Sales Leadership 101 – Are sales and marketing aligned around the customer?

Use this checklist to assess your current interface with marketing – and the customer. If you can’t answer “yes” to the following questions or don’t know the answers, it may be time to revisit the alignment between sales and marketing in your organisation – and your customer focus.

1. Go-to-market strategy

• How complex is your market and offering? If highly complex, does the level of integration intensity between marketing and sales match the complexity of the market/offering?
• Are target segments jointly prioritised by sales and marketing?

2. Buyer confidence and customer focus

• How focused on the customer are you? Have you considered refocusing the sales, marketing and customer success functions around a common mandate to eliminate barriers to buyer confidence and ensure customers achieve their desired business outcomes?

3. KPIs, accountability and incentives

• Are you prepared to challenge functional boundaries and clarity around shared accountability?
• How are sales and marketing measured against shared commercial outcomes, and how are they rewarded?
• Do you prioritise profitable revenue growth as a goal and are sales and marketing evaluated against that shared outcome rather than their respective functional metrics.
• Do both sales and marketing share accountability for pipeline quality?

4. Relationships

• Do you encourage plenty of inter-functional dialogue? Does this happen?
• Is there joint planning between leaders of sales and marketing functions? Importantly, is there mutual trust at managerial levels?
• When engaging with customers, are there shared interactions and engagement?

5. Governance and dispute resolution

• Are decision rights clearly defined among the functions?
• Is there an agreed mechanisms to resolve disputes?